


Merlin the Magical Mouse

by SapphyWatchesYouSleep (Sapphy)



Series: A Very Unjust Christmas [2]
Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Hellblazer & Related Fandoms, Injustice: Gods Among Us
Genre: Biracial Character, Christmas, Christmas Presents, Domestic, F/M, Families of Choice, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fatherhood, Female Character of Color, Fluff, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Kid Fic, POV Female Character, Polyamorous Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-26
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 14:31:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2854277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/SapphyWatchesYouSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christmas morning in the Tower of Fate involves a lot of sticky fingers and crying. But also a lot of love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Merlin the Magical Mouse

**Author's Note:**

> This is ridiculous unashamed fluff, and I don't even care. It's Christmas.

Zatanna’s woken at what feels like a horrifyingly early hour by Rose hitting her bed like a cannonball, stocking clutched tightly in one hand.

“Zee look!” she yelled, far too loud for first thing in the morning. “Dad did it! Santa found the tower!”

Zatanna, who’d stayed up till after two helping John summon and wrap presents for his daughter’s stocking, does her best to smile. “Toldya he could do it. Are you going to go show him what you got?”

“Yup!”

Rose bounced off the bed, abandoning the stocking, and ran out, surprisingly loud in her stocking’d feet. A few moments later she reappeared, dragging a barely awake and mostly naked John behind her.

“M’nin’ Zee,” he muttered. “Wa’s happ’nin’?”

“Santa’s been!” Rose squeaks, jumping back onto the bed. She snatches up her stocking and waves it at him. “Look!”

John smiles sleepily and slides into bed beside Zee. “What’d he bring you?”

Rose tips her stocking upside down, scattering small brightly wrapped parcels over the bed.

She’s a conscientious child, taking her time to carefully unwrap each one and present it to John for approval. They’re nothing much, a few sweets, some colouring pencils and paper, a brightly patterned headband to keep her dreads out of her face when she’s painting or drawing, a tangerine (John had insisted) and a couple of small toys.

She’s delighted with every one, bouncing on the bed with her excitement, and Zatanna thinks fondly what a nice child she is. Her mom hadn’t been anything like rich, but they’d been comfortable, and this is probably nothing compared to what she’d usually get, but she doesn’t seem at all upset by the paucity of the gifts, childishly delighted with each one.

When she’s unwrapped the last one, she carefully puts her presents, even the tangerine, back into the stocking, and crawls up the bed to wrap John in a tight embrace.

Zatanna shifts, not wanting to intrude on a family moment, but John catches her arm and Rose hauled her into the hug as well, her short arms stretched around both their necks. “Thank you so much for helping Santa find me,” she whispers. “It wouldn’t have been proper Christmas without a stocking.”

Zatanna kisses the top of her head fondly. “We want to make this Christmas as good as it possibly can be,” she says.

Rose pulls away, and when she looks at them she expression is sad. “I miss mommy so much. And Steve. And it won’t be the same without them. But I don’t want to be sad on Christmas.”

Zatanna pushes one of the child’s dreads away from her face and says, “It’s okay to be sad, even on Christmas. Sometimes happy times can be the hardest. But it’s okay to be happy too. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s okay.”

Rose smiles, a little strained but determined, and says, “What I’m feeling... is hungry. Can we have pancakes?”

“I’m sorry honey, I have no idea how to make pancakes,” Zatanna said apologetically.

Rose’s lip begins to wobble. “Mommy always made me pancake on Christmas. With syrup and blueberries and bacon and then she did my hair and no one knows how to do it properly here and it’s gone all fluffy and I want my mommy!” She burst into tears, sudden and loud, her small body shaking with the force of them.

John claims he’s unfit to be a father, and he certainly doesn’t have any kind of role models to learn from, but there must be some kind of paternal instinct in there, because he pulls her into a tight hug, rocking her and shushing her, stroking her back and whispering soothing nonsense to her, and just letting her cry.

Zatanna has known John a long time, seen him at his best and his worst, but she never knew he had it in him to be so tender. She had known from the start that this Christmas was going to be difficult, for all of them. There will be too many missing faces around the table, and too many silent voices, but that just makes it all the more important. If Rose is ever going to recover, she needs to start building some positive memories with her new family, even if that family is a grumpy occultist who smells of stale cigarette smoke and (maybe, hopefully) a stage magician who’s frequently told she dresses like a whore.

When Rose’s wracking sobs begin to subside, John says gently, “I don’t know how to make the sort of pancakes your ma used to make, but I know how to make English ones. Maybe we could have those instead, what do you say?”

Rose nods slowly, and John smiles with relief.

“And,” Zatanna says, “Jeff is coming later, and he’s got two daughters. I bet he could teach me how to do your hair properly, yeah?”

That gets her a shy smile and a nod, which after the terrible grief of earlier is like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

“I can wear my new hair band till then,” Rose says, and Zatanna meets John’s eye over the little girl’s head, and he smiles at her, warm and fond.

“Come on then, shorty,” he says, clambering to his feet and swinging Rose out of bed. “Let’s go and make pancakes!”

“Daddy?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re only in your shorts.”

John looks down, apparently surprised at his own state of undress, and shrugs. “I’ll wear Zee’s dressing gown.”

Rose giggles, and Zee, who knew perfectly well that he’d do it, says, “Get your own bathrobe!”

“Can’t,” John says, lifting her purple silk robe down from its hook on the back of the bedroom door and shrugging it on. “Got to make pancakes.”

Zatanna watches them go, then crawls out of bed and rummages in the wardrobe until she finds an men’s white shirt, a leftover from some old lover, which reaches far enough down her thighs to be decent. With a pair of panties underneath, it’s far more modest than what she usually wears to fight crime.

She knows her hair must he a horrible mess, and she certainly has the remains of yesterdays eyeliner smudged across her face, but she doesn’t mind Rose and John seeing her like this, and she doesn’t think the others will be up yet. They’re mostly nocturnal, though the presence of a child in the tower has meant that at least one of them has to up each morning. It’s usually Zee, but occasionally she’ll stumble downstairs late to find Rose chatting with Harley or Selina, or even Batman.

Getting up had only taken a few minutes, but when she gets to the kitchen (apparently a brand new room, since it’s reached via a door in the entrance hall which definitely hadn’t been there yesterday morning) she finds John and Rose already cooking. John’s cracking eggs into a large mixing bowl (the brand new kitchen apparently came fully stocked, which is useful) and Rose is carefully picking out bits of broken shell with a teaspoon.

“Now flour,” John says, clicking his fingers to produce a bag out of thin air. Zatanna doesn’t really approve of just stealing food like this, but they can’t go shopping, and they have to eat something, so she keeps silent. She did make John go and actually buy the ingredients for lunch though, since he’s the best at hiding his magical signature, and the least recognisable of them.

“How much flour?” Rose asks, looking at the eggs. Despite the spoon, her fingers are shining with raw egg, and as Zatanna watches, she wipes them on the front of her pyjamas.

“Some,” John says.

“Some isn’t a proper measurement, daddy,” Rose says severely, and John smiles.

“I do it by eye, I don’t know the amounts. Now careful, you don’t want to get flour in your hair.”

Rose leans back as John shakes in some flour, looks at it critically, and adds some more. It lands in the bowl with a gentle ‘whumpf’, a cloud of white dust settling on the front of Zatanna’s stolen bathrobe (which actually looks rather good on him) and sticking to the eggy bits of Rose’s pyjamas, but mostly missing her hair.

“Now milk,” John says, clicking his fingers to summon it. The finger clicking is entirely unnecessary, but Zatanna’s never met a western magic user who didn’t do it, or something similar. Having a gesture seems to help ground the spell.

John tips in the milk, then hands Rose a wooden spoon. “Time to mix it all up.”

Rose’s mixing is enthusiastic, and some batter is lost overboard, but neither of them seem to mind. Rose is chanting ‘mixy mixy mixy’ as she beats the batter, and John is gazing at her like she’s the most perfect thing he’s ever seen.

“Shall I get the pan hot,” Zatanna asks, finally stepping into the room.

“Please, love. With a bit of butter.”

It takes a while, the new kitchen is large, but eventually Zatanna finds a frying pan and sets it on the range, lighting the fire with a spell rather than bothering to hunt for matches.

“Rose, when you’re done you need to wash your hands,” Zatanna says. “Raw egg is bad for you.”

“Okay,” Rosa says, standing on tiptoe to put the bowl on the cupboard beside Zatanna, and trotting over the sink.

John comes over and gently hip checks Zatanna out of the way, taking the frying pan’s handle in one hand the bowl of batter in the other. He carefully pours out a small amount of the batter, swirling the pan to spread it evenly.

John’s made pancakes for her just once before, back when Nicky was still alive. It’d been nearly the end of the month, broke from a month of particularly hard partying, and no money for takeaway. John’d found an ancient bag of flour in one of the cupboards, and a few elderly eggs, and they’d spend their last few dollars on milk and sugar, and John had made a mountain of delicate pancakes, crispy along the edges. They’d eaten them with no toppings except sugar, and she remembers them being one of the most delicious things she’d ever eaten.

She’d asked him at the time how it was a no-good punk like him knew how to cook, and he’d smiled and said his sister used to make them for him. It’s the only time she ever heard him speak fondly of his childhood.

Overcome by a rush of fondness, she leans in and kisses his cheek and he grins at her. “None of that love. Not when you’re wearing Nicky’s shirt and Rose is watching.”

“This is Nick’s shirt?”

“Yeah. I’ve got one too, though it doesn’t look nearly so good on me as it does on you.” He leans over, one hand still shaking the pan gently, and sniffs at her neck. “Still smells like him.”

Surprised, Zatanna tugs the collar up to her own nose, smells cigarettes and candles and Calvin Klein aftershave and the washing powder she prefers, and smiles at the sudden feeling of nostalgia. The shirt smells like their bed always used to, the scents of the three of them all mixed up together, and it’s infinitely comforting.

“Are you going to kiss now?” Rose asks, right behind them.

Zatanna nearly jumps out of her skin, spinning round to face the girl. “You scared me! Have you washed your hands.”

“Yes. Are you and dad going to kiss?”

“No, love. We’re going to be much too busy eating pancakes,” John says, carefully sliding the first one out onto a place he’s set ready on the cool side of the range. “Zee, you want to see what you can find for toppings?”

Zatanna and Rose search the cupboards between them, Zatanna taking the high ones and Rose the low. They find a plethora of possible toppings, Nutella, honey, sugar and lemon juice, chocolate syrup and maple syrup. There’s no blueberries, but Rose fetches bananas from the fruit bowl in the living room, and Zatanna chops a couple up and puts them in a bowl.

By the time they’ve assembled their hoard on the kitchen table, along with plates, cutlery, glasses, mugs, juice and a carafe of coffee, John has finished cooking the batter, producing a towering stack of pancakes, far more than the three of them will ever manage to eat on their own.

“Whatcha gonna have first, sweetheart?” John asks, sliding a pancake onto Rose’s plate.

“Bananas, and Nutella, and chocolate syrup, and maple syrup, and honey,” Rose decides, helping herself to liberal servings of all of them.

“Syrup, and chocolate sauce, and honey?” John asks, spooning sugar and lemon juice onto his own.

“It’s Christmas,” Rose says, as though that explains everything, and begins carefully copying the way John’s rolling up his pancake into a tube.

Knives and forks have been provided, but Rose elects to eat her pancake with her fingers, picking it up and stuffing nearly the whole one into her mouth at once.

John laughs. “Good?”

Rose nods enthusiastically, rendered uncharacteristically silent by a mouthful of pure sugar.

They’re on their fourth pancake each, and starting to feel uncomfortably full, when Batman wonders in. He’s still wearing the cowl, but the Batsuit has been swapped for a pair of slacks and an honest-to-goodness Christmas jumper. It has reindeer on it. Rudolph has a red pom-pom for a nose.

When he sees them staring, Batman stops, looking shame-faced. “Alfred got it for me,” he mutters defensively, and Zatanna hides her smile behind another bite of banana and Nutella pancake.

“Hey big man,” John greets him, grinning and apparently totally unashamed at being caught wearing nothing but a very short, very purple, silk bathrobe. “Help yourself to pancakes.”

Batman stares at him silently for a long moment, then takes a seat. Rose brings him a plate, and Batman politely doesn’t mention that it’s now covered in chocolaty finger-prints.

He takes a pancake, watches it suspiciously for a moment, and then adds honey.

“This is good,” he offers, after his first bite.

“Joint effort between me and Rosie,” John says, smiling proudly at his daughter. Zatanna thinks she’s seem him smile more in the last six months than in all the rest of the time she’s known him put together.

Rose finishes her pancakes, carefully wipes her fingers (adding chocolate banana and honey to the egg and flour already on her pyjamas) and says, “That was nice.”

“What do you say to your dad,” Zatanna prompts gently. Rose’s manners are good, but it won’t hurt John’s confidence in his parenting skills to be thanked.

“Thank you daddy. Can I get down now?”

“Sure. Probably time you had a bath and got dressed, isn’t it?”

“Okay.”

The baths at the tower are self-filling, and the water is always just the right temperature, so Rose is mostly trusted to bathe by herself, with just an adult checking up on her occasionally to make sure she hasn’t drowned.

Zatanna finishes the last bite of her pancake, already wondering how she’s going to find room for Christmas lunch later, and pushes her plate away. “I know you cooked, John, but do you mind cleaning up too?” she asks. “I want to get showered and dressed so I can start lunch.”

“I’ll wash up,” Batman says, unexpectedly. Zatanna is struck by a sudden image of him in the Batsuit with rubber gloves and an apron, and barely manages to suppress a giggle. “Thank you. That’s very kind. John, I’m going to check on Rose and then get dressed, okay?”

“Okay.” John is still eating steadily, and showing no signs of stopping, so she leaves them too it.

Rose is quite happy and totally undrowned, pushing a piece of pumice stone around the bath with her toes. Smiling, Zatanna leaves her too it and goes to her own room to dress.

There’s a small en suit attached to her room, and she showers, finally washing yesterday’s make-up off her face. She runs a comb through her wet hair, then blow-dries it with a little frivolous magic.

She throws on her only pair of jeans, well worn and comfortable, and slips on a bra. She considers keeping on the shirt, she doesn’t have many comfy tops, but she doesn’t want to have to wash it and loose the smell. (She remembers now, the week after they lost Nicky, doing a spell to lock his scent into two of his shirts, one for her and one for John. It’s held so far, but the spell won’t last forever). Instead she ducks into John’s room a steals a shirt of his. It doesn’t spell like much except dryer sheets, but it’s loose and comfortable. She’ll dress properly later, when lunch is in the oven.

Harley and Selina are in the kitchen when she goes back down, though John seems to have finally ceded defeat and gone in search of clean clothes. They both nod greetings to her, but don’t speak, Selina out of natural taciturnity and Harley because her mouth is too full of pancake. The jar of Nutella is nearly empty.

The four of them are silent as she rereads the instructions in the cook book, and then prepared the turkey, stretching slices of bacon across the breast and covering it in tinfoil. The recipe gives an oven temperature, but it doesn’t say anything about coal-fired ranges, so she just adds a little more coal to the fire from the scuttle, and hopes for the best.  
John and Rose reappear just as she’s closing the oven door, John dressed in his familiar shirt and slacks, though his tie is red rather than black, a concession to the season, and he’s not wearing his coat. Rose is wearing her favourite pink dress, which classes horribly with the bright reds and blues of her new headband, but she’s smiling and happy.

“You have to come now, Zee,” Rose says. “I made you and daddy presents, and they’re under the tree.”

They’d agreed they wouldn’t do presents, since shopping was more or less impossible for most of them, but she and John hadn’t been able to resist making Rose a little something extra when they were doing her stocking last night. They’d ended up spending two hours gently bickering over enchantments, and it had all been horrifyingly domestic.

The presents from Rose are inexpertly wrapped in lime green tissue paper. “Harley gave it to me,” Rose said, when she saw them looking. “Hurry up and open them!”

The presents, once opened turned out to contain…

“Rose,” John said, staring down at his gift, “is this a protection charm? Made out of macaroni and poster paint?”

Zatanna laughed, delighted. “Mine’s an anti-possession amulet. Also made from macaroni.”

“Do you like them?” Rose asked, nervously.

“They’re amazing,” Zatanna said, with feeling. “Definitely the best present I’ve ever gotten. Who showed you how to make them?”

“I asked Doctor Fate for help. He didn’t know anything about making pasta jewellery, or about painting, but he showed me how to do the magic bit.” She grinned, and John grinned back, his eyes full of awed love.

“They’re amazing, love. You’re the cleverest girl in the world.”

Rose’s smiled from ear to ear, obviously proud of herself, and Zatanna pulled her into a hug. “You’re an amazing girl, Rose,” she told her, kissing her dreads. “Amazing.”

“Now your present,” John said, and Rose stood up quickly.

“Present?” she asked, amazed and delighted. “For me?” Later, Zatanna would identify that as the exact moment she fell head over heels in love with that little girl. The moment she decided that she would do anything in the world for her. She’d spent so much time secretly making these incredible gifts for her and John, and she hadn’t expected a thing in return.

John produced the tiny parcel that was Rose’s present. It was wrapped in gold tissue paper, summoned at the last minute when Zatanna suddenly realised that presents from her dad couldn’t have the same wrapping paper as ones from Santa.

Rose unwrapped it carefully, revealing a tiny stone in the shape of a mouse. She ran a gentle finger down it’s back, and the spells reacted to her, just as they’d been designed to, waking her stone pet.

It sat up, staring around itself with quick movements, then scampered up Rose’s arm to nuzzle against her neck.

Rose squealed in delight. “Dad, it’s magic!”

“It is,” John said, smiling. “Me and Zee made it for you.”

“What’re you going to call it?” Zatanna asked, since there was obviously no question that Rose liked her new friend. She was cradling it in the palm of her hand, carefully stroking its head.

“Merlin!”

“Merlin the Magical Mouse,” John said with a smile. “Okay then.”

Rose flung her arms around John, hugging him tightly. “Thanks dad. I think this Christmas is going to be good after all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are the air I breathe, and also the best Christmas presents.


End file.
